Morrison’s Black Slave Female Characters and Their Quest for Subjectivity

Abstract

Classic slave narratives are considered an integral part of Afro-American Literature. But they just present the one side of reality and ignore the other important dimensions. These narratives became a significant part of popular fiction and present slavery just a historic fact. Beloved can be viewed as a neo-slave narrative, it explores the lives of those countless slave women whose stories are absent from dominant literature. She presents slavery not merely as a fact but a memory. She recaptures the lost stories of violence and pain and depicts black women’s heroic struggle to live under the institution of slavery which is named as a dark chapter in human history. Beloved is a symbolic character who reminds of all those nameless victims who died in the belly of slave ships where first time black women’s institutionalized rape began. All the female characters in the novel are fighting against post-traumatic stress and learning new ways to cultivate an independent identity. They know how to cope with ghosts of the past and eventually learn to heal their emotional wounds. Thus all female characters in Beloved question stereotypical representation of black women in literature.